Women and men tend to spend their days differently in the United States. Varying responsibilities and priorities will do that.
For example, look at the percentage of men and women who spend time on household activities during an average weekday. This includes cleaning, laundry, and general upkeep of the household. As you might expect, shown in the chart below, more women than men spend time on these things.
Spending Time On Household Activities
A comparison between men and women
This is based on data from the American Time Use Survey, from 2022 to 2024.
The chart above is called a difference chart. Two lines show data for two categories over time. That’s male and female over a 24-hour period in this case. The space in between fills with the color of the greater value, which emphasizes the size of the difference and the category with the higher value.
So more women than men spend time on household activities, and there are peaks before lunch and dinner time. This is for the overall male and female adult population.
Now let’s see how time use changes for all the activities, by day of week and employment status.
Spending Time Differently, Female vs. Male
On selected activities, by day of week and employment status
Household activities remain more common for women. Also add personal care, caring for household and non-household members, and consumer purchases to that list. Work, sports, and socializing are more common for men.
The greater and less than doesn’t shift much between weekday and weekend or employed and not employed. I kind of expected there would be a flip somewhere, but it seems to make sense. If someone is responsible for an activity on weekdays, then they’re probably responsible for the same on weekends.
While men and women do not flip between greater and less than, schedules shift and change in scale. People get up later on the weekend. More people go to church on Sunday. There’s a bigger difference for sports and exercise on the weekend, especially for those not in the labor force. I suspect that’s Sunday football viewing more than it’s going to the gym.
I wonder if these schedules will eventually converge as more women work full-time and salaries grow more even.
Notes
Estimates are based on data from the American Community Survey, which asks participants to log what they do during a 24-hour period. The survey runs throughout the year and data is released annually. This is data for 2022 through 2024. I downloaded microdata via IPUMS, prepared data in Python, analyzed in R, and visualized with D3.js. This is an update to a 2021 version that used a set of stacked area charts.
